We all know that once in a while you find a game on some social platform and play it for a day only to then completely forget it even existed, well according to a report release by Playnomics 85% of gamers will play a social game only once and then never return.
That’s just one of the findings of the Playnomics Q3 2012 Player Engagement study. This quarter, Playnomics gathered data from more than 30 million players, these are just some of their findings:
- U.S. women quit playing games at a slightly higher rate than males.
- The most game time is played on Saturday, but people tend to play longer on Mondays and Tuesdays.
- Players are most likely to try a new game for the first time on Saturdays.
Chethan Ramachandran, the chief executive officer of Playnomics, stated “We pull and analyze data from millions of players worldwide, across all the online social games in our PlayRM platform, to determine results with important, applicable implications for developers.” Furthermore he said that their main focus was on “When do players return to your game, and how frequently? What are the triggers for player returns? Which are most likely to share your games with their friends? Why do they come back, and how often?
Founded in 2009, Playnomics was the 2010 winner of VentureBeat’s Who’s Got Game start-up competition. Playnomics raised funding from FirstMark Capital, Accelerator Ventures, and TriplePoint Capital.
Those interested can read more HERE!
What about you, have you ever played a game once and then never returned?
You can see this with the performance of Draw Something. A massive surge in players for the first few weeks (most of which are probably new users day after day) and then a drop after the acquisition by Zynga. Unfortunate for Zynga but truly inevitable. It’s great to put figures to the statements though as so many of us game developers have discussed the eventual downfall of social games like Draw Something and we pin it to the reason that most of these games aren’t made competitive enough.
I believe that adding online gaming to the picture and adding achievements which allow the user to feel a sense of success hooks the user in and this can really increase retention. Most game developers overlook this aspect of gaming that people game for escapism to feel a sense of achievement outside their mainstream lives and therefore developers should really embrace this aspect of competition by bringing in achievements and leader-boards to games where competition may be relatively low.
Anyway, great post! Really nice to quantify the statements. Thanks
Ash @ AppGeeks